


Every Breath, Every Hour

by willowoftheriver



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Blending, Canonical Character Death, Explosions, F/M, Falling In Love, Game: Resident Evil 3 Nemesis, Game: Resident Evil 3 Remake (2020), Injury, Self-Sacrifice, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:53:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23591899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoftheriver/pseuds/willowoftheriver
Summary: Jill finds her soulmate on a street in downtown Raccoon City in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. At first, she's not very happy about it.
Relationships: Carlos Oliveira/Jill Valentine, mentioned Albert Wesker/Chris Redfield
Comments: 98
Kudos: 337





	1. you can stand under my umbrella

“Hey, easy, lady . . . I got you.”

Jill doesn’t even notice the words, though they’re pushed into her skin right there along the inner crook of her arm. She’s looked at them almost every day of her life—even reached up and rested her hand over them a few times in the midst of that hellhole in the forest. But how can she focus on anything now when her head is still ringing with the sudden _stop_ of the car hitting concrete, and her eyes are watching as that fucking freak falls burning to its knees but just _refuses_ to collapse any more than that?

She’s wondered before what the moment would be like, if her soulmate was the first one to talk to her—what she would think to say in that instant, knowing that the words were _fated_ , seared into their skin long before they ever popped into her head?

As it is, she doesn’t think about it at all. “Who are you?” is all she can manage, barely able to hear her own voice in her ears. “What are you do—?”

“Name’s Carlos and I’m saving you!”

He’s . . . plucky. It’s a weird word to come to mind, one that seems more like she should’ve used for Rebecca, but it’s all she can manage as he hauls her to her feet. Her knees are shaky but she can still put one leg in front of the other—she has to, because she already knows enough to realize that this isn’t _nearly_ over.

(Umbrella didn’t kill her at the Mansion. She’s sure as hell not going to let them do it here.)

Carlos closes the shutter as soon as they cross into the subway, and she falls against the nearest wall to catch her breath, reorient her vision. There’s still tinnitus at the edge of her hearing when she shrugs off the return of his arm.

“Personal space,” he says, holding his hands up nonthreateningly. “I get it.”

Yet he keeps shooting her glances as they continue on. He walks a little too close as he explains about the survivors and an evacuation point at St. Michael’s Clock Tower, and his eyes dart across her shoulders and down her arms frequently enough to be obvious—then they linger on the inside of the left one, squinting to get a better view.

When she sees his eyes widen, her own eyes dart to the crook of his elbow, because soulmates tend to have their words in the same place.

_Who are you? What are you do—?_

“I always wondered why it was in English,” he says with a smile that almost seems _shy_.

Jill’s mother had always thought she was headed for some kind of disaster, with words like hers. An accident, maybe. Yet this is quickly becoming the biggest disaster of Jill’s life and she’d never once thought it would happen _now_.

Yet then he opens his mouth and says, “Thank God the company sent me here, huh?”

Her heart drops a little in her chest, with the same dead weight as that car from a few minutes ago. “Company?”

“I’m with the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service. My squad was sent here to rescue civilians, but we weren’t expecting—”

She thinks, very briefly, of Chris. Of how happy he’d been when he and Wesker had found each other. And of what he is now.

Chris’s soul is too good for the other half of it to be so _ugly_ , but even seeing that mess play out in front of her still hadn’t snuffed out her hopes in the way Carlos has right now.

In that Mansion, she’d occasionally rested her hand over the words on her arm to remind herself that she couldn’t die there—there were still things waiting for her outside its walls, things she _had_ to do. She couldn’t leave their words unspoken.

“ _Umbrella_ is the one behind all of this,” she bites out, pulling away from him.

She had never once imagined that if she’d died that night, her soulmate would’ve been a part of the thing killing her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aw, Jill, he's not a sociopath. Umbrella just provided really great hair insurance as a benefit.
> 
> (I can finally, finally be a hipster and say I actually shipped Jill/Carlos before it was cool.)
> 
> Story title is from the song "A Thousand Years" by Christina Perry (it seemed very fitting for a soulmate au) and the chapter title is from Rihanna's "Umbrella." It was secretly written about RE anyway.


	2. maybe it's a cruel joke on me

“You didn’t even think to ask ‘fine young lady’ her name?”

Carlos doesn’t say anything, just kind of lowers his head, pretends to be busier than he is digging around in a first aid kit. Jill realizes she doesn’t even know his surname.

This guy—Carlos’s superior, obviously—turns a sharp eye from her to him and back again. She doesn’t doubt he can sense the tension between them, but what really concerns her is that he seems shrewd enough to guess at its cause.

“She is an elite operative of R.P.D. Special Tactics and Rescue Service. Her name is . . . something . . . Valentine.”

Jill’s mildly surprised, at first. But of course, Wesker would’ve reported it all back to Umbrella, every detail. (Honestly, what did being an _elite operative of the RPD_ even mean anymore, when all they’d ever actually been were Wesker’s guinea pigs?)

“It’s Jill,” she decides she might as well say. Carlos doesn’t look up, at least not entirely—not until she’s heard this Mikhail Victor’s sob story about his dead platoon, and how they were only sent here to _rescue civilians_.

Jill could tell him her own story about her own team, and how they’d been trying to save people, too. But there’s a whole subway car full of innocent people that have to take precedent here, and if she has to play ball with Umbrella for their safety, fine.

“But I’m on their side. Not yours.”

“Oh, hey—hey, that’s cool,” Carlos finally says. “We all want the same thing.”

He actually meets her eyes. His are a deep brown and they seem so earnest she could almost believe him, but a few minutes ago she’d told him just who exactly was the cause of all of this and he’d actually had the nerve to say, “What’s wrong with Umbrella?”

So she snatches the radio he offers her out of his hands and cuts off his talk of staying in contact with a succinct, “I know what it does.”

And if, before she leaves for the streets to meet the _thing_ she knows is waiting for her there, she maybe pauses for a half a second in the doorway of the subway car to watch as he turns to Mikhail, fretting over him with a first aid spray in his hand, well—Carlos doesn’t notice.

.

Jill returns to the subway station with a few fake gems rattling in her pocket.

(She can’t help but think of the Mansion again, and Tiger’s Eyes, and George Trevor. Moonlight Sonata plays in a loop at the edge of her mind.)

But she only gets to slot two in place before she hears the burst of machine gun fire echoing up from deeper within the tunnels, the angry shouts.

She finds Mikhail just as he throws a grenade at the small horde collected in front of him. She ducks around a corner for cover, bracing herself against the energy of the blast.

Mikhail is still alive when she decides it’s safe to emerge, though he’s covered in zombie gore and favoring his bad side.

“My—my men were wiped out,” he manages as she helps him back into the train. “I can’t stop just because I was wounded.”

She knows that feeling, from every sleepless night when the pills just weren’t working and all she could do was stare at the board on her wall. It expanded every day, over her apartment, over her life.

But his men were killed by victims themselves, all of it thanks to their own employer. She can’t feel too sorry for that.

Instead, she looks askance at his wounds as he falls heavily into his seat, his head lolling back against the wall. She can’t quite tell what caused them, especially the one to the torso, but that chunk out of his arm, right in the middle of the Cyrillic lettering that she supposes are his words—it could very well be a bite.

“Just rest for now,” she says, reaching into the first aid kit beside him and pushing a few aspirin into his mouth, careful to avoid his saliva. “Where’s Carlos?”

“Still clearing rubble from tracks. Helps him clear rubble from brain.” He tilts his head at her, looks pointedly down with dilated eyes at the words along the interior of her arm. “Carlos is good kid. A little . . . how do you say . . . _dim_? But good.”

She can only manage the tightest of smiles, and even that’s unexpected as it comes to her face. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

And maybe, maybe she actually does a while later—as the pound of that thing’s footsteps are drawing nearer and the guttural sounds in its mouth cohere into a single word. _“S.T.A.R.S._ ”

She ducks under the closing shutter and would like nothing more than to just stay there, but those people on the train aren’t who it’s after.

(And neither is Carlos.)

So she gives it just enough time to make sure the shutter is low enough he won’t be able to follow her back under it, and she runs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had plenty of issues with the remake, but I did love Mikhail's characterization. However, the scene with him in the second half of the chapter was overall taken from the original game.
> 
> Thanks so much for the response to the first chapter!! It really encouraged me!!
> 
> Chapter title is from the song "Pity Party" by Melanie Martinez.


	3. let's start a fire in an alleyway

“You could’ve been killed!” Carlos says, like she doesn’t already know that.

“Don’t start,” she snarls into the radio. She’s feeling acutely _impatient_ after escaping that fiery hellhole via near-fall-to-her-death, and doesn’t Carlos fucking _get it_ , that she was partially doing it because—because—

But it’s dead now, and that’s all that matters.

“I did what I had to,” she finally says, and ends the communication. (If she thinks she hears a _thank you_ on the tip of his tongue right as she does it, well—)

Then she keeps doing _what she has to_ —headshotting these mindless, hungry people who aren’t people anymore, who she hopes wouldn’t want to continue in their state if they could still think.

Robert Kendo is a surprise as he darts out from behind a corner at her, shotgun in hand. More surprising is that he refuses to go with her, but then she gets up close to the door he’d vanished behind and hears the faint, _sickly_ moan of, “ _Daddy_.”

Jill has to rest her head against the door for a second, take a steadying breath. She hadn’t known he had a child. It makes her grateful that _she_ doesn’t have one, that she didn’t meet Carlos before—before—

But what if she had? What if she knew him before she ever knew Umbrella?

(But the question just makes her think of Chris again. It makes her a little nauseous, worsens the vertigo that’s been her near constant companion since the first time she fell off a roof.)

Of course, then that _son of a bitch_ decides it isn’t quite dead, after all. Or anywhere near it.

“ _S.T.A.R.S._ ” it says, heaving a rocket launcher over its shoulder. There shouldn’t be so much malice in a single, brainless word.

Then she’s running, and jumping, and screaming into her radio, and the world is exploding around her, and if she’d thought that rooftop was hell, she’d been so naïve.

“I think I know how to slow that fucker down.” Carlos’s voice cuts through the disorientated mess of her reality.

And something deep and visceral in her hates the thought of leading it back to him, _anywhere near him_. It nearly paralyzes her chest and for just a second she thinks, hysterically, of Wesker shooting a dog away from Chris. She was running then, too, right into the start of it all where Wesker was going to give Chris all the meager help he wouldn’t extend to Jill, because not even Wesker had wanted— _not even Wesker_ —

But Umbrella hadn’t killed her then and she’s not. going. to. let. them. do it now, even if it means that she has to meet Carlos where he says.

(But it doesn’t stop her from feeling like her heart’s beating in her throat when he finally comes into view.)

The mine only brings the thing to its knees ( _does anything ever do any fucking differently?_ ) but for a second all she can do is stare at it dumbly, like all her hate might be able to just drop it dead right there.

“Are you okay?” Carlos asks, but he pushes her on towards the nearest shutter when her words won’t come.

Though then they return in a rush when she realizes he’s lingering behind her. “Come on, leave it, forget about him!”

She makes sure he’s moving before she hits the button to lower the shutter, but she regrets it all, right down to coming here in the first place, when he pulls nearly her own trick from the subway on her. He stops and turns and shoots, and she’s just bending her knees to dive back under there after him when the explosion rocks the ground and he rolls under, the gate slamming shut on flames.

He lies there, a little charred, and smiles up at her. “Hi again.”

And Jill can only stare at him, her ears ringing in the sudden peaceful quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chris got Wesker to help him in the Mansion while poor Jill was stuck with Barry calling her a sandwich. It's even funnier because it's canon.
> 
> Thank you so much for the response to the previous chapters!!! :)
> 
> Chapter title comes from the song "When the Lights Go Out" by Oingo Boingo.


	4. i've been a fool and i've been blind

Jill debates with herself momentarily, then takes a deep breath and opens her mouth.

“Look, I know we got off to a bad start—”

“I kinda liked the start, actually,” Carlos throws over his shoulder, the fast pound of his footsteps never faltering. “It was what came after that was a little, uh . . .”

“Okay, yeah. But I want you to know that I do—I _really do_ appreciate you saving me like that—”

“You saved me first. I think you’re probably a hell of a lot braver than I am, actually, letting that thing chase you when all you had was a handgun—”

“I had to. It’s me it’s after. I couldn’t put—I just couldn’t—”

“Why is it after you, anyway? Can’t resist your charms? I mean, can’t say I could blame him, if that’s the case—”

“Haven’t you heard what it says? ‘S.T.A.R.S.?’ It’s because we know too much. My team went into the forest and found— _everything_ Umbrella’s been hiding from the world.” She barks out a laugh, reconsiders. “Actually, I’m sure it _wasn’t_ everything. It probably barely even scratched the surface. But it was enough. Umbrella owns this town, you know? I was born here, and they’ve been everywhere for as long as I can remember.”

Carlos finally does pause, as they’ve reached the same shutter she’d ducked under. It was probably only about an hour ago that she did that, but it seems— _ages_ ago. “What did you see?” he asks, studying her with those wide brown eyes.

(He _is_ handsome, Jill has to admit. She’s not blind, nor in so much denial she can refuse reality entirely. It’s a . . . boyish look, and that _hair_ —)

Of course, then he keeps talking. “I mean, I’ve been with them for a few years and I’ve never seen—”

“Let’s just,” she says, holding up her hand in annoyance, “let’s just not ruin the moment, okay? That thing’s stalking me and you really didn’t have to get involved but _thank you_. I mean it.”

He looks at her strangely. “I _did_ have to get involved. For you especially. But no one in this city deserves to die. That’s why—” He cuts himself short, looking studiously at the ground as the shutter grinds upward beside him.

“What?” She extends a hand, but thinks better of letting it lay on his shoulder and it falls uselessly back to her side.

He takes a deep breath. “We can get everyone out of the city now. You’ll be safe.” And he smiles at the thought of that, even as he continues: “But from the sound of it, I won’t be catching the train.”

No, no, no. She didn’t—she didn’t serve herself up to that thing on a platter just for—for—

“ _Why not_?”

“New orders.”

“‘ _New orders_?’” she repeats incredulously. “From Umbrella?”

“If it means I can help save the city, that’s fine by me.”

She realizes, all at once, what had only been a vague, creeping suspicion before: this is a _good_ man here in front of her. Not so long ago, she’d been fooled by Wesker, yes, and that still makes her doubt—doubt _everyone_ , and everything. But Wesker had never been so simple, or straightforward, or painfully earnest.

And it just makes her angry all over again, especially once she gets to the train and realizes fucking _Nicholai_ is on it.

“I’m not gonna die on you and leave you in a cold, cruel, Carlos-less world,” her—her _soulmate_ says to her as she lingers uncertainly in the entrance to the car.

And that would be a cold, cruel prospect for anyone—losing their soulmate so soon after finding them. Another thing Umbrella would’ve ripped away from her, somehow infinitely worse than even her teammates and her sanity and her city, however stupidly illogical that is—

“You’re learning,” says that smug blond jackass where he lounges on a seat. “The only life that matters is your own.”

The Cyrillic letters of his words are there clear as crystal on the arm hanging leisurely over his knee. (They only make her more disgusted with him.)

She turns away without saying anything, sits primly down far away from him and looks out the window as the train begins to pull away. Carlos doesn’t quite smile at her, but he watches until she’s completely out of sight, and she watches back.

She stares out into the moving blackness of the subway tunnels for a long time after that, lets her head rest against the cool glass. Eventually, mutterings draw her attention back over to Nicholai.

He’s crowding into Mikhail’s space, leaning down over him with his arm up, hand latched around a strap. Jill can just imagine the shit-eating smirk he’s giving him.

“Funny how brainless zombies can ambush a platoon like that.” Mikhail meets his eyes wearily, and for the first time Jill realizes their words are both in about the same place, on the same arm. But surely, it’s just a coincidence. “Funny how the gate was locked.”

Nicholai laughs and reaches out his free hand to pat Mikhail’s shoulder, heedless of his glare.

Then the lights snap off, and before Jill even has a chance to fully register that, the back of the train is gone and she’s staring at that miserable fucker as it breaks some innocent civilian’s neck and throws him away like trash, just like it had all the others scattered at its feet.

“S.T.A.R.S.,” it says. (She wants to wring that goddamn word out of its throat.)

“They’re gone—” Mikhail holds her back as she charges at it mindlessly, pushes her in the opposite direction. “It’s too late! Go! Run!”

Not that doing so does her any good, because fucking Nicholai has locked the door.

“It’s not after me.” He actually _winks_.

Jill spins back just as it pulls Mikhail away, and what he’d said earlier comes back to her, as he’d sat here on this train cradling his side and his arm and Carlos had mentioned how much he’d lost.

“Nothing that I will miss,” he’d replied. Not even those words on his skin.

And Nicholai won’t miss Mikhail, either, but as he pulls the pin in the grenade and the world loses all its order, Jill knows that she will.

(And she’s so thankful that Carlos wasn’t here.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aww, Jill's warming up to him because she can't resist the force of his hair. Also Nemesis is working as an unintentional cupid. What's better than risking your lives for each other against an unstoppable being to prove your devotion to each other?
> 
> Nicholai's awful and I love him.
> 
> Nightmare and Inferno difficulties were an utter bitch in this game. That final boss needs to be forever stunlocked by its own fucking tentacles.
> 
> Chapter title comes from "Shake It Out" by Florence + the Machine.
> 
> Thanks so much for the kudos and comments!


	5. i can feel you behind my eyes

So this is . . . was . . . Jill’s workplace.

It’s . . . fucking weird.

Seriously, it looks, at best, more like an art museum or a very fancy library than, of all things, a _police station_. The doors alone, with their elaborate playing card themed crests, not to mention that statue in the lobby and all the stained-glass windows, as well as basically . . . everything else.

Well. Maybe Raccoon City was a really classy place before it went to hell. Did a lot of rich Umbrella executives live here? Who knows? (Maybe Jill, but certainly not him.)

The main thing that’s fascinating to him is that Jill spent time here in this building. He doesn’t know how much—hell, he doesn’t even know her age, much less how long she’s been employed by the RPD.

And yes, he does wonder whether she thought about him, before she ever knew he was him—if she looked at her words or traced them with her fingers or mouthed them in the same way he had. But mostly, he wonders what sort of days she had here—if she enjoyed them. If she liked her job and talked and laughed in some of these rooms, long before—before she says Umbrella ruined it.

(Why _aren’t_ they simply rescuing Bard? Why is it obviously a _detainment_? He might’ve found the cure, and that’s great! Isn’t it?)

He can’t help but feel guilty as he uses the card he took off the corpse of what was obviously Jill’s teammate— _Brad Vickers_ , _Alpha Team,_ it says—to open some lockboxes and scavenge what’s inside them. But he doubts that that guy, or anyone, would really want to exist in that state. As a . . . zombie.

(Of course, then the guy appears outside the evidence room just about as soon as Carlos has managed to grab the battery to that bomb in the locker room, and he has to shoot him all over again. It’s pretty fucked up shooting not just cops, but _Jill’s coworkers_.)

When he finally blows up the locker room’s dividing wall and gets into the S.T.A.R.S. office (that acronym has been engraved into his mind by this point like no other English word ever could be), he takes a long look around. Bard isn’t here, unfortunately, but on the other hand, he decides he has the time to try to decide which desk had been hers.

The jacket that says “Made In Heaven” seems a little over the top for her, but then again, it’s not like he would actually know. (And that irks him just a little, because he really, really wants nothing more than to just listen to—to, hell, her entire life story, every detail he ever wondered about before he knew she was her, but she’s so _angry_ —)

Still, he walks over to that desk, takes in the cluttered top. Again, Jill doesn’t seem the type, but people _can_ be surprising. Though the picture he finds by the computer, face down in an expensive, shattered frame, of an extremely handsome blond man—that makes him hope against hope this was a coworker’s desk.

Not that he has much time to think about it, as an impatient clearing of a throat comes from the computer on the opposite desk, its monitor sitting beside the photo of an eager Golden Retriever.

“Fucking finally,” the man on the screen spits, glaring.

“Um,” says Carlos, taken completely aback. He guesses this is Bard, but he’s a bigshot biologist—a man educated in a way Carlos couldn’t have ever even hoped to be. Surely he wouldn’t be so—s _o_ —?

“Do you know how long I’ve been trying to reach somebody?!”

“Sorry,” Carlos says, for lack of anything else. “Doctor Bard? I only just got here, but we’ve been looking for you, we’re gonna get you out of there—”

“I’m trapped in a goddamn hospital, surrounded by every kind of abomination . . . Look, just send in S.T.A.R.S. They’re gonna know what to do.”

“Nah, negative, RPD’s completely overrun, too—”

“ _Then figure it out_!” he barks. “Umbrella’s gone crazy, they’re killing all their researchers. It’s a fucking liquidation! But I’m the only one who knows how to make the cure! So you can either sit there with your dick in your hand or send—send _somebody_ who’s capable of getting me out of here!”

The feed cuts off unceremoniously. If it was a phone, he would’ve slammed it down.

“Like him already,” Tyrell says as he enters and clicks the door shut behind him.

Carlos rolls his eyes. “You would. But however _great_ the guy is, you heard what he said.” Even if it didn’t make any sense. Why would Umbrella send the UBCS to save civilians but not do the same for their own people? Actively _kill_ them instead? “If it’s true, we can’t turn him over to the company.”

“That’s Mikhail’s call, not ours.”

Carlos knows Mikhail is a really good, levelheaded guy, but still he can only frown, eyes panning around the room again. Jill had come back here at some point after . . . whatever had happened to her, had sat at one of these desks and stewed and agonized about it. And he still doesn’t know what exactly ‘it’ is, except that she says Umbrella was responsible for it.

Can he honestly not believe her? How could he, when he’s waited for her every day, every minute—? Umbrella got him out of poverty, has given him so much that he can even send enough back to his mother and his siblings that it ensures they have what they need, and he’s _devoted_ to them for that. (But that doesn’t change that when it comes down to it, no company could ever be _her_.)

He pokes around the room a little more, trying to find a keycard for a weapons’ locker behind some grating. He doesn’t succeed, but he does find a picture in the adjoining office that makes him smile, Jill all dressed up in an outfit with outrageous shoulder pads, kneeling in the front row of a team shot.

(Of course, hadn’t she implied her team had died? That takes some of the strength out of his grin. That, and the sight of that same blond guy in the upper row.)

“Carlos . . .” comes a rasp into his ear, raw and vulnerable. His spine straightens immediately, going ramrod.

“Jill?”

“There—” Her voice slurs disconcertingly. “—was a—a crash. The train derailed because of that—that _fucker_.”

“ _Derailed_? Was anyone hurt?!”

She laughs. It’s hollow and fucking _upsetting_ ; even more so when he says her name again and again but she doesn’t reply.

“ _Where are you_?” he finally demands. But there’s still only the crackle of white noise, cold and dead.

After a second, he looks desperately to Tyrell. The man has already guessed what they are to each other, even if Carlos danced around confirming it, so he can’t be surprised when Carlos says, “I have to go find her.”

Fuck Bard, however important he is to the city.

He knows it’s selfish and a part of him hates himself for it, but nothing can change that Jill will always be first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooh yeah, they're doing this on Inferno difficulty. Brad doesn't want to die when that's the case. I expect he'll come back to torment Claire and/or Leon after Carlos leaves.
> 
> Chapter title comes from the song "Bloodstream" by Stateless.
> 
> Thank you all so much for the kudos and comments! I appreciate all of them!!


	6. destroy everything you touch today

Jill is numb and unthinking and aware of only the nearest things to her face when she first stumbles out of the burning train car.

Then she collides with a concrete wall and the pain hits, full and unmerciful.

That she should call Carlos is her first conscious thought, surfacing like a drowning man in her mind, but it’s immediately subsumed by the sheer fucking agony welling up from her bones—the ribs, definitely, more than one broken, and the collar bone, and God, she’s not a doctor, but there seems to be so much else, and in the soft tissue, too—from her toes to her eyes. She hurts _everywhere_ , and it’s even infinitely worse than when she’d been sitting in the helicopter after that fucking mansion, with burns and bruises and a migraine pounding in her head.

(That tyrant on the helipad had just been a prototype, hadn’t it? And now they’ve goddamn _perfected_ it.)

When she does finally manage to catch her breath, disturbingly bloody as it tastes, she reaches a shaking hand to her radio, but all she’s met with is white noise.

It’s pretty apparent she’s underground, though, so she holds out the faint hope that the radio isn’t entirely broken.

She stumbles forward, past the flaming debris of the subway car and zombies that she headshots one at a time, her unsteady grip on the gun making it difficult. The fresh air of the surface, when she finally reaches it, she gasps in. It doesn’t do anything for her pain, but her lungs are so relieved to be free of the smoke that it nearly has the same effect—lets her think more clearly.

“Carlos?” she says into it, agonizingly raising a few fingers to make sure the accompanying earpiece is even still there, push it further back into her ear canal.

The radio’s dangerously rattily in her hand, very much on the brink of breaking, but he responds. “Jill?”

“There . . .” She wishes her voice could be steadier, but it’s impossible. She almost sounds drunk, if she had to describe it. (And she’d certainly know; she’s been drunk pretty frequently since the Mansion, however much she’d realized again and again that it wasn’t helping anything. The disconnect always seemed worth it, if only for a little while. It was just that it never lasted for nearly long enough.)

“—was a—a crash. The train derailed because of that—” She does, actually, gag. It’s involuntary. Because yes, she hates Umbrella more, as a whole, but that—“that _fucker_ —”

“ _Derailed_?” His voice sounds so young that Jill—despite how many people have told her that she’s _so young_ to be where she is—feels old, and jaded. “Was anyone hurt?”

Jill can only laugh. She’s not really capable of words in response to that, just—this _sound_ that comes from her throat. And by the time it’s over and she thinks she can form a coherent sentence, the radio is sparking and nonresponsive. She slaps and shakes it like more damage might somehow fix it, as it’s the only thing in her power to do.

“Carlos?” she pleads, but there’s no response.

Then she really does feel alone, in a way she hasn’t since the Mansion. And even then, she’d always had the sense of her teammates in her periphery, the hope dangling in front of her that she could walk into the next room and find Barry, or Chris, or Wesker.

But it’s for the best, isn’t it? She’s poison now—everyone who extends a hand to her, who even talks to her, they all die. Even Dario Russo, that asshole—she’d gone back for him, but he’d been out of the storage crate, his guts in the rotting mouths of the zombies on their knees around him.

At least it hadn’t been that thing. At least she doesn’t have to hate herself for it. (Entirely.)

Saint Michael’s plaza isn’t really that big, but the opposite end of it seems so far away as she drags herself there, every breath a knife in her side. At least she finds a potted green herb sitting out at the base of a statue; she rips it out by the roots and chews it until her mouth is numb and gritty with potting dirt and bitter little remnants that refuse to go down however much she swallows.

It doesn’t help much, but it does get her to the bridge. She’s just in time to get a clear view of the thing tear its way out of the wreckage like a raging bull, run blindly until it hits the river water and sinks.

“Bitch can’t even swim,” she mutters. And that really would be funny, wouldn’t it? If after all that firepower, what actually ended it was the thing stuck helplessly on the floor of the river like a piece of heavy trash.

But she’s not that naïve. In fact, she feels the passage of every second acutely, because she knows that her grace period is running out with each one.

The inside of the Clock Tower is beautiful, insomuch as she can appreciate it. Though something about the architecture is disconcerting, too—oppressive gothic lines and rich colors, a dining room with a long table and elaborate fireplace.

“Hope it’s not Chris’s blood!” Barry declares in her memory, and with her ears ringing so deeply she can feel it in her skull, it almost sounds like he’s right behind her.

But no, no—it’s not Chris’s blood here, just civilians’ and that of nameless, faceless UBCS. One of them clutches a piece of paper in his stiff hand that blandly details evacuation plans. Just ring the bell and a helicopter will appear, simple as that.

Except Jill has this sinking sensation beneath her heart—and while she could blame it on how incredibly fucking _wrong_ it would feel to leave, to be safe, while Carlos is still here, that feeling has followed her ever since she got on that train without him and it’s not this.

No. This is the dread she had in her gut that night in the Forest, before the first dog ever appeared.

It’s the nagging instinct that _this is not going to go well_.

(And it doesn’t.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I was just a teensy, tiny bit upset they cut the clock tower. It was one of the best levels of the original game imo.
> 
> They probably actually smoke the herbs. :) But I do think RE3 remake is the first time anyone explicitly ate one, isn't it?
> 
> Chapter title is from the song "Destroy Everything You Touch" by Ladytron.
> 
> Thank you all so much for the kudos and comments! Stay safe!


	7. who would've thought forever could be severed?

Jill has two handgun clips. Twelve shotgun rounds. Seventeen grenades for the launcher, of varying type. And three hand grenades that can’t be loaded, just thrown.

She uses them all.

And that fucking _thing_ —that utter son of a bitch who she’s come to hate so much more than Wesker, nearly more than even Umbrella itself—does collapse, eventually. It falls, the dull, sickening thud of its body nearly jarring the ground as much as the rescue helicopter it had brought down around Jill’s ears.

Or maybe her legs are just trembling. Because they do give out.

It’s just she’s not sure whether they would’ve anyway, or if it’s because of the little piece of itself it flings out with its last breath to slice cleanly through the tissue and muscle of her arm.

Her throat creaks uselessly as she stares at it, a scream refusing to come. She doesn’t feel her knees hit the ground.

(Umbrella didn’t kill her in that Mansion, so she wasn’t going to let them do it now. But they just have.)

There’s white noise in her ears and her world is fixed to that one point, because that’s really it, isn’t it? She’d spent so long worrying if she’d been infected in the Mansion, if she’d breathed it in or if it had slipped into a cut or a nick in her skin and was just taking its sweet time incubating inside her body.

But all that worry didn’t matter. Her survival in the Mansion _didn’t matter_. Because now her worst nightmare is coming true anyway and what did those two months of life buy her? A dead end investigation? A train full of dead civilians, dead helicopter pilots, dead Mikhail?

Carlos.

Yes. She could never be sorry she met him. But it also makes it all the more painful. Every time she’d ever looked at those words on her arm, wondered about them, taken comfort in them, it had all been leading up to this. Just a few hours in this horrible place, half of them spent hating him.

It makes it seem like it was just a cruelty written across her arm, a rope of inevitability pulling her to this outcome every minute, every hour, since she was born.

And it’s so unfair to Carlos. Umbrella used him and now she’s going to leave him, and it never tends to go very well for the sole surviving half of a pair of soulmates. Even Chris—that agony, that black depression, she knows it wasn’t all entirely because of what Wesker turned out to be.

But at least—at least without her, Carlos might have a better chance. He might be able to make it out of the city without falling victim to the scourge that’s followed along with her everywhere she’s gone. She doesn’t have to have his death on her conscience.

She can’t walk, however she tries. The pain’s became all one big, indistinguishable mass that no herbal remedy or first aid spray could ever fight off, and she swears she can feel the virus already squirming in her blood, her saliva, the liquid in her eyeballs, the oily sweat that plasters her shirt to her back.

Her body’s screaming at her to stop moving but she won’t let it. This is a wide open area; a horde could wander in at any time, drawn by the scent of blood, and she refuses to let her body be torn apart and eaten. (There’s still a little control she can have over her own death and she won’t give them that, no, no—)

She drags her own dead weight along until her nails are broken and bleeding and that one arm feels so swollen it might boil, might pop.

Her hands slip along the marble floor tiles once she makes it back inside the clock tower, glass from the shattered floor-to-ceiling windows grinding beneath her.

(For fuck’s sake, why didn’t the her from all those hours ago, the one who now seems so foreign, so far away, choose to wear better clothes?)

She doesn’t know how long it takes her to reach the door to the chapel. Time is a concept seeping out of her alongside her infected blood. All she knows is that she thinks she can feel the first stirrings of fever by the time her hand manages to turn the doorknob.

The chapel’s a pleasant room. Empty, clean. Only the one entrance, which Jill doesn’t have the strength to barricade, but she does manage to click the heavy door shut behind her.

There’s a soft light flickering down from the candles on the altar. It casts gentleness over the room, rounding out shadows, sweetening colors. Haloed figures look kindly down on her from stained glass windows.

Jill can’t make it up off the floor. She finally goes still there between the pews, on a thin red carpet that her numb hands can’t quite feel. If she listens closely, she thinks she can hear the susurrations of her cells deforming.

She wishes, more than anything, that her handgun wasn’t empty. That she hadn’t lost her knife. That she even had a rope she could use to break her neck.

But instead, all she can pray—here in this Godly place—is that Carlos won’t ever see her as what she becomes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, Jill, it's all cool. You're a protagonist.
> 
> What outfit is she wearing? Well, I left it vague so you can decide yourself, though personally the original tube top/miniskirt combo will always be my favorite.
> 
> Thanks so much for all the kudos and comments and sorry for the wait! It was some genuine writer's block but I'm also in Statistics hell. It's a required class for my degree but fuck it so much.
> 
> Chapter title is from "If I Die Young" by The Band Perry.


	8. if i fail, i'll fall apart

Carlos can’t hold back the tears when he looks at the remains of the train. He doesn’t even try to.

This has been a living nightmare, however long he’s been here, but it had been worth it, even before he met Jill, because at least he’d been helping people. And there had been plenty of them—women, children, families, all of them on that train car.

Now he can’t even distinguish individual bodies. It’s just charred, twisted meat.

It’s not even the wasted effort that could make him collapse right there—just the horror, the grief for all those people who’d been _so close_ to surviving. They could’ve made it, _should_ have.

But Jill’s alive. She called him afterward and she sounded bad . . . _injured_ . . . but she has to be around here somewhere. He’ll find her, and he’ll patch her up, and they’ll get out—somehow they’ll get out, even if he has to carry her.

(Sweet God, please don’t let that thing have found her first.)

He finds a trail of zombies with bullets in their heads, a few of them still twitching. It lets some of the sick tension go out of him, because it’s proof of life, and even more, that she’s still able to defend herself.

The bodies lead him up to the surface, out into a wide plaza edged by a river, but there are fewer of them the further he gets. Still, it doesn’t take much to assume she took the bridge.

He smells the fire before he ever sees it, smoke infringing into the air that had been relatively clear, compared to the overwhelming stench of decay that hung so heavily in the city’s streets and alleys. His heart drops, all that tension rushing back a thousandfold, when he finally spots the burning remains of a helicopter in the clock tower courtyard.

She had to have summoned it—those were the instructions from HQ, that it would be on standby awaiting a signal on the ground. But _was she on it_?

He rushes up as close as the flames and heat will allow, but it’s not enough for him to make out anything in the in the twisted mess of the helicopter’s insides. He thinks of darting into it to search, the rising hysteria pushing down any self-preservation, but somehow he holds himself back, heart beating frantically in his throat.

There are bullet casings on the ground, a lot of them. And while he can all too easily imagine that monster, that so obviously can _think_ , seeing a golden opportunity in shooting down the helicopter after she was on it—what if it didn’t? What if all these casings mean she fought back?

(Still doesn’t mean she won. But she can’t be dead. She _can’t be_.)

There’s no other sign of her in the courtyard, so he pulls open a set of big old fashioned doors leading into the clock tower proper. There’s a beautiful room on the other side, with a design that reminds him a lot of the police station. Raccoon City obviously likes its dramatic architecture.

Of course, it’s kind of marred by the gigantic, fucking _unnatural_ spiders crawling all over the place. He almost gags when, after he shoots them, they curl up on their backs and release hundreds or thousands of babies, which are huge in their own right.

He steps on them as best he can, but still ends up fleeing behind the nearest door into a library with floor to ceiling bookcases. The caretaker’s bedroom is off to one side, a room with some . . . eclectic art to the other, as well as a workbench in the back and a door blocked by one of the tower’s disused bells. An illuminated sign with a bold white **H** is on the other side of the street adjoining the window beside it.

There are more gigantic spiders everywhere, but no Jill. Not even that fucking stalker he’d like to shoot in the face a few thousand times.

Eventually he backtracks to the entrance, stepping on spider spawn as he makes his way to the opposite door. The room beyond has a grand piano and broken stained glass windows that run from floor to ceiling, and though it’s pretty far from most of the familiar, comforting architecture of his own country—outside of what could be found in, maybe, a church—he can appreciate it.

(Carlos feels sorry that this place, this whole town, beautiful as it is, is probably never going to recover. He just can’t see how it could.)

That he finds Jill so suddenly behind the adjoining door nearly knocks the breath out of him, mainly because she’s lying on the floor completely unmoving and pale, on her stomach with an arm outstretched, fingers still clenched in the carpet.

“Jill!” He’s at her side instantly but still there’s time for thoughts to race through his head—she’s not in the helicopter, oh thank God, but what if she’s cold when he touches her, cold and stiff and gone forever—

But she’s not. In fact, his initial overwhelming, blinding relief is slowly crept in on by worry, because she’s not just warm—she’s burning up, so hot the fever has to be dangerous.

“Jill!” He turns her over and pulls her into his arms, carrying her a few short steps to an altar and lying her down across the thick blue cloth there. As he tries to wake her up, he mutters a quick prayer under his breath. They’re right in front of a tabernacle, after all; it has to count for something.

“Ca-Carlosss . . .?” Her rheumy eyes barely crack open, even as she squirms, like she’s uncomfortable in her skin.

“Yes! It’s me, talk to me, Jill! What happened?!”

“Car-Ca—K-k—” Her voice drops off into a whisper, so he ducks his head close to her mouth, grabbing her hand tight.

“I’m here!”

Finally, he makes out the words. “ _Kill me_.”

Umbrella HQ had briefed them before they left, even handed out little flyers that listed all the symptoms of infection—persistent hunger, restlessness, fast heartbeat, nausea, sweating, tremors, swelling of the mucous membranes, itchiness, fever. Discoloration and necrosis at the site of infection, spreading outward.

He’d noticed something he thought was a bruise on one of her arms, but it’s only now as he searches for any hint of a bite or a scratch that he turns it over, prompting an agonized gasp, and finds the mass of swollen red flesh and engorged veins surrounding a little fragment of something embedded there.

He pulls it out, stares at it. He wants to just fucking crush it in his bare hand, because how could this little nothing barb have killed Jill?

No, no, no. She’s _not_ dead, not yet. He doesn’t know how much time he has, but he knows where the only person in this city with a cure is, and the hospital isn’t even that far away. And though he’s already surmised that Bard’s an asshole, if he doesn’t agree to hand it over then . . . then Carlos’ll just _force_ him to, whatever he has to do.

Biting back a sob, he squeezes her hand one last time. “Please hold on, Jill. Fight it! I’ll be back soon, you’ll be okay, you’ll _be okay_ —”

But if she isn’t?

He doesn’t know what he’ll do. Just that he probably won’t survive it, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Carlos has just been having a tough week.
> 
> I kept Jill in the clock tower because I found running from the exploding hospital and playing hide and seek with Nemmy funner while returning with the cure than The Cabin Fight 2.0.
> 
> Sorry about the wait!! Thanks for the kudos!!
> 
> Chapter title is a lyric from "Oh No!" by Marina and the Diamonds.


End file.
